“Incredibly considerate and incredibly insulting at the same time.” This is how a woman describes the expanded chairs in the waiting room of the bariatric clinic. Though inanimate objects, these chairs seem somehow animate: capable of provoking incredible consideration and insult at the same time. This woman is not describing the hospital administrators who purchased the chairs nor the designers from whose imaginations they sprung. Instead, she refers to the chairs directly, as if it were they doling out insults and praises in turn. In her experience of them, this is precisely what they do.